1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to semiconductor processing technologies and, more particularly, to an integrated semiconductor wafer processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the semiconductor industry, various processes can be used to deposit and etch materials on the wafers. Deposition techniques include processes such as electrochemical deposition (ECD) and electrochemical mechanical deposition (ECMD). In both processes, a conductor is deposited on a semiconductor wafer or a work piece by having electrical current carried through an electrolyte that comes into contact with the surface of the wafer (cathode). The ECMD process is able to uniformly fill the holes and trenches on the surface of the wafer with the conductive material while maintaining the planarity of the surface. A more detailed description of the ECMD method and apparatus can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,176,992, entitled “Method and Apparatus For Electro-chemical Mechanical Deposition,” commonly owned by the assignee of the present invention.
If a conventional plating process is performed to deposit the conductive material in a deposition chamber, the work piece may be transferred to another chamber in the cluster tool for polishing mechanically and chemically, e.g., chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). As is known, the material removal can also be carried out using electrochemical etching by making the wafer anodic (positive) with respect to an electrode after completing a ECD or ECMD process.
Regardless of which process is used, the work piece is next transferred to a rinsing/cleaning station after the deposition and/or polishing steps. During the rinsing/cleaning step, various residues generated by the deposition and/or polishing processes are rinsed off the wafer with a fluid such as water or the like, and subsequently wafer is dried.
Conventionally, processing chambers are designed in multiple processing stations or modules that are arranged in a cluster to form a cluster tool or system. Such cluster tools or systems are often used to process a multiple number of wafers at the same time. Generally, cluster tools are configured with multiple processing stations or modules and are designed for a specific operation. However in such conventional cluster tools, deposition and cleaning processing steps both typically require separate chambers. For this reason, in known cluster tools, for a wafer to be processed and cleaned, it must be moved to another station or system. Thus, such configured systems require picking wafers from a particular processing environment and placing into a cleaning environment. This may not be appropriate because during such transfer of the wafers, contaminants such as particles may attach themselves on the wafers. Additionally, such sequence of unloading, transporting, and reloading of the wafers may be costly and time consuming or require larger footprint.
To this end, there is a need for alternative integrated processing systems which reduce manufacturing cost and increase manufacturing efficiency.